‘The First Purge’ Teaser Is Really Going for It With the Trump Thing

All this promotional material for the fourth Purge movie, The First Purge, looks so familiar, but I just can’t put my finger on why. I dunno, it’ll come to me.

The very first teaser for the new movie debuted Tuesday evening, and it plays like a campaign ad coupled with a sinister recruitment video. Join the Purge, and make America great again.

The First Purge takes us back to the origins of the Purge, and explains how the fictional New Founding Fathers got everyone in the country to agree to setting aside a day for everyone to do the most violent crimes they can think of. It began as a social experiment, confining the violence to Staten Island, and paying poor people to stay and become victims. “People from Staten Island can easily go to Brooklyn for the evening, so what they do is start promising very decent sums of money for the very poor people in the neighborhood,” screenwriter Jason DeMonaco explained a few months ago. “It becomes a monetization of murder and violence, incentivizing killing and keeping people around for them to be victims.”

That’s an appropriately grotesque beginning for a tradition designed to reveal the basest of human intentions, and really fits in with The Purge series’ whole it’s-really-about-society thing. The First Purge may be set in the future, but it’s a future so near it looks uncomfortably like the present.